Developing a Love of Learning Through Play and Exploration

At The San Francisco School, our preschool is child-centered, where learning happens through exploration, creativity, and hands-on discovery. Our experienced teachers thoughtfully guide activities that support each child’s growth, building essential social, emotional, and cognitive skills while fostering independence, responsibility, and compassion through Practical Life, Play and the Outdoors, and Social and Emotional Learning.

Here are some tangible examples of how this approach is implemented in our preschool classrooms.

Montessori Practical Life Activities

Practical Life activities teach children how to respect themselves, each other, and their environment. Practical Life projects—like pouring, sweeping, polishing, table-setting, spooning, and sorting—play a key role in the Montessori classroom. These everyday tasks help children grow in independence while also building important habits of mind: organization, focus, memory, and a strong sense of order (like remembering to return materials where they belong!).

Additionally, through repetition and care, children experience the satisfaction of completing real, meaningful tasks. Many Practical Life activities also involve sorting small objects in more than one way, which encourages mental flexibility, creativity, and the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.

Math – Sorting

Sorting is one of the foundational math activities in early childhood education. When children sort objects by color, size, shape, texture, speed, or type, they are learning to observe and describe attributes — the specific qualities that define and differentiate things. These hands-on experiences help children organize their thinking, notice patterns, and make comparisons — all key building blocks for logical reasoning. Sorting also develops language as children learn to use descriptive words (“bigger,” “round,” “same,” “different”) and justify their choices (“I put all the smooth ones together because they feel alike”).

Beyond the preschool years, sorting lays the groundwork for more abstract mathematical thinking. The process of grouping and categorizing by shared attributes is an early form of classifying data — a concept that leads directly into algebra, where students group, compare, and represent quantities using symbols and variables. In other words, when a child separates buttons into groups of “red” and “blue,” they are practicing the same kind of relational thinking that will later help them understand equations like x + y = z. Sorting nurtures both mathematical precision and flexible thinking, empowering children to see how the world can (often) be organized, analyzed, and understood through patterns.